Trump's Stalled Offensive
Trump is not in retreat yet, but a slow news weeks shows how little good news there is for the president, and how unlikely it is that will change.
Last week was slow for news, though even a slow news week feels like frenzy in the age of Trump. I have written before that Trump would eventually face the challenge of running out of grand actions to capture the sociocultural media surround, and instead would be face with managing the consequences of what he’s already done. We’re seeing that now.
Much of what Trump has already done is under adjudication or has been stymied in the lower courts—you can read this fine piece by Jack Goldsmith in Executive Functions for a good explanation of how the courts have countered the Trump’s illegalities and prosecutorial incompetence of his DOJ. Other consequences are showing up in public approval polls that suggest plunging support in every area, including immigration, which had been his strongest claim to success.
Things in general are not going well. Inflation is above target and expected to increase this year as Trump seeks to stimulate the economy before the mid-terms, while the job front looks increasingly bleak. The market is jittery about AI, and while predictions are for steady gains this year, market volatility suggests the potential for a crash if some sort of bad news comes along.
That’s already happened with Bitcoin, which fell off the table last week. Trump’s embrace of crypto, which accounts for half to two thirds of the billions the president has made since taking office. At least some of the bros who voted for Trump because of crypto and Bobby Jr. are feeling angry right now.
Trump has so far managed to avoid a sense of failure in his recklessly personalized foreign dealings—Iran, Gaza, Ukraine, China, and trade relations in a newly multilateral world where the U.S. is just another player, an untrustworthy one at that—but there’s no good news for him in any of those story lines.
Stephen Miller’s videogame approach to ethnic cleansing, with film crews following the cos-playing Kristy Noem, has completely backfired now that video produced by the opposition has captured the attention market. A Quinnipiac poll found that 82 percent of U.S. voters said they had seen the video of Renee Good’s murder, and even more may have seen the killing of Alex Pretti.
It’s not clear that ICE is actually in retreat or that reports that Miller is losing some of his power are accurate, but Trump knows he has to change the story and that makes it less likely that we’ll see the invasion of Minneapolis repeated in New York or Boston.
There’s nothing ICE and the DHS can do now to improve Trump’s numbers but to back off, and the real testing ground is how much Democrats can force ICE to operate within the law by threatening to cut off funds for it in a shutdown.
It says something about how bad the ICE story is for Trump that he had the DOJ dump an enormous trove of documents from the Epstein files in order to distract from it.
The Epstein story is never good for Trump when it resurfaces, but the files had to be released sometime. Dumping them last weekend assured that the press would lunge from the ICE story to focus on digesting the material, a process that is still ongoing and has yet to cohere into a settled story line.
The timing argues for some sort of big action by Trump next week to distract now from the Epstein files, with the very tenuous negotiations with Iran providing the most likely candidate. Trump has already put the gun on the wall and the first act is over. There are reports that the Saudis have already said they would accept a limited airstrike, so the only real question may be which war plan Trump chooses from the options presented by his generals.
One of Trump’s options is to go after Iran’s regime itself in an attempt to end the theocracy and usher in a new government of some sort. None of Iran’s neighbors want this, since it would gravely destabilize an already chaotic region, so one must count on Trump’s ability to listen to reason.
If there were a betting market in this (actually, I’m sure there must be), I would take even odds on a limited strike sometime in the next 10-14 days, enough to capture the news for a week or two, but not become a major, ongoing story.
In this, Venezuela provides the model for the political use of military force, much as Grenada did in another era: provide the world with a striking demonstration of military might, declare victory and get out, then let the story fade away.
Last week saw just a handful of Venezuela stories in the Times, all normalizing the new status quo, in which the U.S. acts as proconsul to a despotic regime, propping it up in exchange for access to oil. The question of whether this is something that the United States should be doing no longer has salience. The attention machine has moved on.
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In all of this, Trump continues to demonstrate that he can capture the news cycle simply by blurting something out or making a deeply offensive racist post on Truth Social. In one way, the press isn’t wrong to treat these blurts as news, and the reaction to the post of the Obamas as ape showed that there are at least a few lines Trump can’t cross.
But really there was nothing new about it—Trump’s Truth Social page is an endless scroll of the most deceitful and appalling “news” and AI memes. You could write a story every day about the worst of Trump’s social media posts, and the fact that he makes them almost every day has been normalized now, god help us all.
I’m thinking instead about how Trump’s offhand remark about “nationalizing the elections” coupled with the bizarre FBI/DNI raid in Fulton resulted in so much news coverage and commentary taking the idea seriously. That’s just a mistake. It’s a crackpot idea that flies in the face of constitutional language so explicit and direct that even a hack like Alioto or Thomas can’t parse it in Trump’s favor.
The story should have been covered, as a stray utterance, a bad idea unworkable in practice, coupled with an entirely illegal use of the FBI and Gabbard’s even less legal presence at the raid—all covered as signs of Trump’s increasing desperation as he reads the writing on the wall for next November.
There used to be the saying about Trump that he should be taken seriously, but not literally—like he would say extreme things as a candidate and mean them as signifiers of his political stances, but that they were just rhetoric, not plans. In his second term Trump taught us to take him literally, too—he’s done things that fall far outside the scope of what one might have imagined any president would do.
I wonder whether it is time now for the press to start taking Trump literally, but not seriously—to treat his literal plans and actions with the objective contempt that they deserve. Stories about Trump’s threat to federalize elections should have led with the idea that it is unconstitutional. Instead of indulging implausible scenarios, they should have taken the opportunity to simply state the constitutional facts.
I won’t go off on the press here, except to say that when we talk about Trump’s use of distraction as a way of manipulating the news cycle, it should be noted that it only works if the press lets him get away with it. The distractions themselves are real enough—sometimes just as real as the huge effigy, smoke and fire and roar of the Great Wizard of Oz , but usually it’s just the con man behind the curtain. We need to start covering that version of Trump, the real one.
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The noise amid stasis of the past week has me reflecting on how I was writing about Trump early on, as I was starting this personal chronicle of the era. I mapped what was happening as the Trump Show, with the president as showrunner and protagonist, and I likened Trump’s assault on democracy and the constitution to Hitler’s war against Europe, and found myself using that analogy for Trump’s progress and setbacks.
It seems like a strangely apt analogy to me, not so much because of the association of what Trump’s doing with the Nazi project, since that is misleading, but simply because of parallels in the progress of each war.
When last November’s elections dovetailed with a significant drop in Trump’s approval polling, I suggested that we were entering into the period shortly before the siege of Stalingrad, which lasted about eight months and could have come out either way at certain points. In this model, next November’s election marks the point at which the siege breaks and the invading army is forced into retreat.
This prediction seems safer than when I first made it, but we’ll see. I have yet to see concrete evidence that Trump has a pathway to stealing the mid-terms, but January 6. So many actual or possible crimes have been committed in his administration that preventing Democratic control of Congress is nearly an existential challenge for Trump.
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I ran across a YouTube video on Adam Tooze’s wonderful Substack Chartbook that provided a week by week account of the actual Battle of Stalingrad, and while it was fascinating in one way, it was also very dull. Every moment mattered, with progress and retreat measured in meters sometimes, but it was all just a terrible grind of two virtually immovable forces, and ultimately a war of attrition.
I think that’s what we’re seeing right now in the battle for democracy. There’s no discernable tipping point in sight before the actual mid-terms themselves, and while Trump’s forces are in retreat, they’re still capable of counter-offensives at any moment.
The November elections are eight months away—just about as long as the siege of Stalingrad lasted. There are some inflection points along the way, with protests scheduled and the big 250th anniversary show being planned, and we have learned with Trump that on any given day a headline story may break—though not always in his favor anymore.
But my sense is that we’re going to have a lot of weeks ahead like this one just past, where new developments in various storylines just move the story along in a sort of stalemate, with the attention machine scattered and nothing really breaking through as a success for Trump, or as a decisive failure.
Trump only wants the surface of attention, enough to provoke the visceral response without ever letting us focus for too long, so that we live in a continuous present, with the future undiscussed and the past steadily erased. The work of Elon Must and DOGE is the perfect example of this—a huge flurry of largely illegal and ill-considered actions that amounted to less than nothing, filling each day’s news for weeks and then just disappearing, to be almost forgotten.
That was all less than a year ago, but it feels like ancient times now. Venezuela seems bound to disappear in the same way as long as the new dictators do as ordered. The flood the zone with shit approach really works—at least for a while.
Now the zone is flooded, and each story has its own life. Trump only controls his part of the narrative, but he has created an environment now in which ongoing developments across a broad range of areas serve as a sort of ongoing distraction engine, making it very difficult for any story to settled into a sort of coherence.
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This seems like the ongoing story in this political year, with everything pointed toward that dispositive battle in November, and a sort of ongoing chaos surrounding what will always have been the central story of the year. But there’s one way in which the story could change, and it might happen—maybe sooner than later.
A great deal of Trump’s success relies on the support of people who have never aggregated his behavior and judged the whole picture. Like any charismatic leader, his populist appeal derives from image and persona, both the projection of tough, even ruthless strength and savvy, and his easy belligerent contempt for the enemies he shares with his audience. Trump supporters process him viscerally, not rationally—the part you see on TV, not the part you read about.
It’s one of the bully’s survival skills—getting away with things, erasing the past. People who do aggregate, who know about the whole sordid history and see Trump for the con man he is, found it bewildering that he could beat Hilary or even more that a man with his criminal record could win the presidency a second time.
The sweeping nature of Trump’s second victory along with the way he crashed into the presidency breaking everything he could reach caused a sort of cognitive dissonance and despair among those who opposed him. All of Trump’s actions have been violent, an unbridled flexing of personal power and his control of the state, and we’re still in a bit of shock, even after the erosion of Trump’s power since last November.
In all of this, there has been a sort of attribution of magical powers to Trump, a sort of dark magic that lets him get away with things that were once thought unthinkable. It is the dark magic of the bully, the sense of threat that cows one into a sort of angry submission.
And Trump is a bully with a gang—a real gang, that includes a lot of violent and disordered people, along with a lot of racists and xenophobes, and also some small businessmen, and some MAHA dopes, and the crypto bros, and anyone who really hates the democratic elite. It is a truly motley crew, and in its base it represents the worst of the American spirit, a foul strand that has been with us since the founding and had to be defeated once in civil war.
Trump is down to his base now, and his political power is significantly weakened. The people who voted for Trump because they don’t aggregate, not because they hate anyone, but because they wanted change, are seeing him in action now. And they’re peeling away in ways that show up in every poll.
So far, that’s the story: Trump and the Republicans have lost the independent vote, and the Trump endorsement doesn’t seem to have the same force that his presence on the ballot did a year ago. The Democrats should retake the House in the fall and may win the Senate, and after that Trump is in a lot of trouble.
I’m wondering now whether another story may emerge from within that political one, a story not simply about Trump’s loss of political power, but rather about a change in the way that the nation sees him and talks about him—that we start talking about the man behind the curtain, the emperor with no clothes.
Three bits of news struck me last week. The first was J.D. Vance being booed at the opening of the Winter Olympics—not an especially startling occurrence, and underplayed by the times, but it got good play in the opposition media surround.
But that made me think about Trump’s announcement that he wasn’t going to the Super Bowl. Trump said it was because it was too far away, an entirely absurd excuse, and it seemed obvious that it was to avoid video images and headlines of him being booed by spectators, something that has happened at other events.
It’s a good move on his part, since there would certainly be booing, and booing is contagious in an energized football crowd, and it could all look very bad for him at one of the most televised spectacles in the world. And, of course, there’s Bad Bunny and the pathetic alternative programming with that icon of family virtues, Kid Rock. It makes sense.
The third thing was Trump’s racist post of an AI video in which the Obamas’ faces are superimposed on two cartoon apes, like in the Lion King—a film that still must have some sting for Trump, since it was the punchline of Obama’s famous roasting of Trump at the 2012 Press Awards banquet.
That was suddenly a step too far for everyone, with Trump’s most important Black enabler, Tim Scott, calling Trump on his racism and Jefferies posting “Fuck Trump.” For many Republicans, if not most, the racism only works when it is covert, framed in dog whistles or projected on “criminal” immigrants with brown skin. This was different, entirely indefensible in every way.
That Trump took the post down and blamed it (implausibly) on a staffer’s mistake may have quieted the story—it is too early to say. But it was striking to me how much of the backlash against Trump felt personal.
Semaphore had a piece on Saturday morning that captured the repugnance on Capitol Hill, among Republicans as much Democrats, a level of judgment going beyond criticism to suggest disassociation from Trump. “This is why I am retiring,” said one member of Congress, according to the article.
I’ve always wondered, maybe based on nostalgia for a different age, whether we might ever see the same kind of moment with Trump that we saw with Joe McCarthy in the Army hearings—“Have you no decency, sir? At long last, have you no decency?”
I am imagining a different world—the world I grew up in, actually, when the concept of decency still had cultural valence—but I have wondered whether something like that defining moment may someday come for Trump.
Perhaps it won’t, or maybe not in that way. We have entered the stage of history that Trow predicted in The Context of No Context, in which history is made by the lunges of the demographic rather than the acts of individuals—a meme stands in for the Secretary of the Army, and virality depends on skill and timing, a sort of readiness within the audience that turns into stickiness.
If you boil Trump down to his basic elements, he is weak and fragile, a bully with a frail ego, cunning but not intelligent, unstudied and basically incompetent in the job he holds. He also is entirely hypocritical, self-serving, and manipulative—an act, not a person. His lack of empathy and lust for vengeance are features, not bugs. He is a truly dreadful man, not excused by his various psychiatric maladies.
Pretty much everyone who actually deals with Trump knows this about him. A recent story that blipped across the screen highlights this theme: during Davis, the president of Slovakia, who has been an ally for Trump in Europe, spent 45 minutes alone with Trump and came away saying that Trump is crazy. This report was denied, but Slovakia has now changed its stance toward the U.S.
At some point Trump’s behavior, along with popular dissatisfaction on matters like the economy and immigration, may cause a break with him for anyone who seeks to continue to be thought of as a reasonable person. That was certainly the meaning I drew from the reaction to Trump’s racist post—no one was willing to paper that one over, except for Trump’s puppet Mike Johnson, maybe.
I used AI to do a scan of stories about Trump in the past six months, looking in the mainstream media for uses of the word “beleaguered.” This is a good word for the press when a major figure like a president is under pressure from multiple directions—Biden was beleaguered, Bush was beleaguered in his second term, and so on. AI didn’t find any cases in which it had been applied to Trump.
I’m wondering if that may change soon, if we might start seeing that word or a synonym (“under attack”) applied to a presidency in chaos or crisis (choose your word.) Trump’s actions have spun out all these storylines, many of which wouldn’t exist at all under a normal presidency, and now most of them represent problems for his administration, which has seen much of its political capital erode.
I really don’t know what that looks like, since right now there is a lot of bad news for Trump, but it is broadly distributed, not aggregated, and a lot of it is still in process—from ICE and the DHS shutdown to Iran and Ukraine.
It takes an element of shock or surprise for something to break through, like a sudden plunge in the valuation of AI stocks that brings the whole market down, or a really bad jobs report. Right now, about 45 percent of the nation strongly disapproves of Trump. That’s enough to take the mid-terms, but not to end Trump’s power and hold in themselves.
It probably won’t happen, but Trump’s potential for own goals as he grows increasingly impulsive and erratic should not be underestimated. Posting racist memes of the Obamas is deeply offensive, but it also is incredibly stupid in political terms. Trump’s actual base, his floor of approval, doesn’t mind that sort of thing—but that’s only about 30 percent of the country, maybe even a bit less.
There’s a strong element of social norming in the development of political identity and voting decisions, especially among the sort of non-affiliated, more occasional voters that helped bring Trump his victory in 2024. Supporting Trump was cool enough, and certainly not strange, in influential parts of the podcast world and in various working-class communities, including Latino communities, that voted for Trump on economic grounds.
That’s changing now. It’s a good deal less cool to support Trump in some of the circles that welcomed his victory a year ago. At some point, embarrassment sets in—it’s not just what he is doing, but how he looks and talks, how unpresidential he is. A very different image of Trump is emerging in popular culture, with inroads on the right as well as the center. No one likes a man who gets booed at the Super Bowl.
I think we’ll see a time when Trump’s support is winnowed down to that dead-ender base. It may have to wait until after the mid-terms, but it could come sooner that. I’m going to keep searching on the word “beleaguered” and I’ll let you know when I find it.